At the 1987 Academy Awards, Steven Spielberg was presented with the Irving Thalberg Award, given to an individual filmmaker whose body of work reflects a consistently high quality of creative motion picture production.
"I'm told Irving Thalberg worshipped writers," he said in his acceptance speech, "and that's where it all begins. We are first and foremost storytellers, and without, as he called it, the photoplay, everybody is simply improvising. He also knew that a script is more than just a blueprint. That the whole idea of movie magic is that interweave of powerful image, dialogue, performance, and music that can never be separated - and when it's working right, can never be duplicated or ever forgotten.
"Ive grown up most of my life sitting in the dark, looking at movies. Movies have been the literature of my life. The literature of Irving Thalberg's generation was books and plays. They read the great words of great minds. In our romance with technology and our excitement at exploring all the possibilities of film and video, I think we've partially lost something that we now have to reclaim. I think it is time to renew our romance with the word...for only a generation of readers will spawn a generation of writers."
